#Elaine Brewster

[faustiandevil]

The Criterion cover for Arsenic and Old Lace is pretty iconic now with the little puppets and the purple backdrop and the artist, F. Ron Miller even did an article about how he workshopped the idea with Criterion’s art director, Eric Skillman. You can find the article right here:

[blondebrainpowered]

Arsenic and Old Lace, 1944

GIF by Supermodelgif (ghost blog)

[mametupa]

[gnome-adjacent-vagabond]

For the love of god don't google this movie before you watch it, just go into it completely blind.

[angelamontoo]

Haven't made an alignment meme in a while

[bodiesinourcellar]

Found on Internet Archive- 1977 program for the Play Troupe of Port Washington presenting Arsenic and Old Lace

[just-1-scorpio]

The mmassages so far part 1

[starry-edit]

Wishing you a safe and Happy New Year!

2023 Art Summary!

Other than March due to my iPad being out that month Ive managed to make one digital piece if not two.

This year has been a hard year, hopefully 2024 will be better!

[citizenscreen]

Publicity photo shows Cary Grant as Mortimer Brewster and Priscilla Lane as his fiancee Elaine Harper in Capra’s ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944)

[themoleperson]

Cellar Symbolism in Arsenic and Old Lace (the play!!) (spoiler warning)

okay so. for context, i am playing Mortimer in my school's production of Arsenic and Old Lace, and while thinking about my blocking for the show, i realised a fun bit of potential symbolism. (spoiler warning for what's below this :3)

i'd also like to note that i make a lot of reference to "madness" within this little piece of writing. this is meant more to be in the literary sense than the psychological sense; after all, madness as a concept has some very ableist roots. however, it is the best word and the best frame of reference i can think of.

ALSO CW FOR POISON AND MURDER AND STUFF

(image credits: https://broadwayplayhome.com/shows/arsenic-and-old-lace.htm)

The Good Stuff

a little more context. this weird essay thing is not a replacement for seeing or reading the show. i do not explain the plot well. this is to serve a purpose. please read it (hopefully not the racist version) and/or watch the movie if it interests you :33

basically, if you're not familiar, this play follows dramatic critic Mortimer Brewster and his whacky family drama. his aunts (mother figures basically) kill old men and bury them in the cellar, his brother thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, and his other brother is a murderer. there's a whole theme of madness throughout the play. the protagonist believes that his family is cursed with insanity, and as the play goes on, all the fun family hijinks have Mortimer feeling quite unwell and slightly insane. luckily, at the end of the play, he finds out he's a bastard and the day is saved, but i'd like to more deeply explore this theme of madness... especially as it relates to the cellar.

as mentioned earlier, the cellar is a body disposal site. this came to be after a man died peacefully in the care of the Brewster sisters, and wanting to bury the man, they used a lock that Teddy built for the "canal" (he believes the cellar to be Panama), bury the body, and give him a full denominationally-appropriate funeral. but the cellar also has a more interesting narrative purpose. i have noticed that every single Brewster enters that cellar at one point in the play, save for one man: Mortimer Brewster.

i posit that the cellar itself represents the Brewster madness, and every character that enters that cellar has some sort of close connection to it. the aunts, who poison people, and Teddy, their unwitting accomplice, all go down their multiple times over the course of the play. they are tainted by the Brewster madness, are participants in the bloodshed. Jonathan also goes down there, joined by his accomplice Einstein (its a long story). he is a notable murderer and enters the cellar to hide a different dead body; he, and Einstein, are participants in the Brewster madness.

this metaphor also, if you stretch it a little bit, apply to Elaine. Elaine Harper, Mortimer's fiancée as of the beginning of the play (#justice for elaine, mortimer is a dick to her), is at one point dragged down into the cellar by Jonathan, because she enters the house and discovers him. i propose that this symbolises Elaine being dragged into the Brewster madness, as much as Mortimer tried to keep her from it.

Mortimer, however, is one of several characters that does not enter the cellar. he interacts with it often, shutting the door, or shouting into it to call somebody up, but he never enters it. why is this notable, though, if other characters avoid the cellar? because Mortimer is (supposedly) a Brewster. he should be engaging with the madness, should be down in that cellar. but he's not. he stays aboveground, because he is not really a Brewster, not truly a participant in this madness. he is a bastard. (sidenote: my favorite line in the play is when i get to just scream "IM A BASTARD!!!!" its so fun).

as for the other non-cellared characters, it's interesting to see how they interact with the cellar without going inside it. my favorite example of this is Lt. Rooney. Rooney is confronted several times with characters telling him there are 13 bodies in the cellar, but he refuses to believe it. he thinks the whole thing is crazy, doesn't believe the story for a second. this comes to a head when the aunts try to invite him into the cellar to show him the graves. he almost goes, almost engages with the madness, but Mortimer stops him.

you may disagree with my interpretation, which is totally awesome and actually i really wanna hear how y'all interpret the play because i love it so much and i have NO ONE to discuss it with other than my fellow actors. i just noticed it, thought it was cool, and tried to analyse it because analysing things is fun and i like thinking about stuff to much. "no the curtains weren't just blue, they were a 'deep, melancholy' blue, and that says something about the text", and all that stuff.

anywaysss, i hope whoever reads this enjoys it. i may do more analysis stuff like this in the future; i have some good stuff cooking on a book i've been reading in class called Where the Crawdads Sing. thank you for reading!!!!

[vintagestagehotties]

Hot Vintage Stage Actress Round 1

Ruby Dee: Libby George in Jeb (1946 Broadway); Ruth Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959 Broadway); Lutiebell Gussie Mae Jenkins in Purlie Victorious (1961 Broadway); Cordelia in King Lear (1965 American Shakespeare)

Elaine Stritch: Pamela Brewster in Loco (1946 Broadway); Grace Hoylard in Bus Stop (1955 Broadway); Mimi Paragon in Sail Away (1961 Broadway)

Propaganda under the cut

Ruby Dee:

Beautiful and talented! She's in the American Theater Hall of Fame for a reason! And that doesn't even speak to her work as a civil rights activist and a woman who didn't back down easily.

Elaine Stritch:

[supernovaae]

List of all 80 Espers still in the running for Hottest Esper (05/01/24 | Alphabetized)

Abigail (Frigga)

Adrina (Chantico)

Ahmed (Geb)

Alice (Gullveig)

Anna (Persphone)

Archibald (Mictlantecutli)

Asenath (Nefertem)

Ashley (Heimdall)

Brewster (Garmr)

Camille (Hati)

Catherine (Hela)

Cecilia (Isis)

Chloe (Medea)

Chu Yao (Tai Yi)

Clara (Hera)

Drew (Anubis)

Eira (Freya)

Elaine (Nyx)

Embla (Ymir)

Ethan (Pan)

Everett (Tyr)

Farrah | Aminah (Tiamat | Abzu)

Fatum Sisters (Nornir)

Feng Nuxi (Nuwa)

Feng Xun (Fu Xi)

Fu Shi (Suan Ni)

Fumitsuki (Kaguya-hime)

Gabrielle (Njord)

Gaius (Zeus)

Ginny (Hestia)

Hailey (Hephaestus)

Heng Yue (Chang’e)

Hilda (Hypnos)

Hyde (Hades)

Ife (Meretseger)

Ikki (Tsukuyomi)

Intisar (Kauket)

Javid (Shamash)

Jiang Jiuli (Chiyou)

Jiang Man (Meng Po)

Jin Qiu (Ru SHou)

Jin Yuyao (Queen Mother)

Leora (Athena)

Li Guang (Vermilion Bird)

Li Ling (Nezha)

Liam (Xolotl)

Lian (Jiao Tu)

Lin Xiao (White Tiger)

Long Mian (Ao Bing)

Lucas (Apollo)

Mateo (Prometheus)

Mavis (Mictecacihuatl)

Nicole (Nephthys)

Norah (The Muses)

Ollie (Osiris)

Ophelia (Thanatos)

Parmi (Ninsun)

Raven (Odin)

Sachiko (Hare of Inaba)

Sally (Sif)

Sander (Set)

Sienna (Gaia)

Su Jue (Daji)

Tang Xuan (Sun Wukong)

Tevor (Sphinx)

Tiye (Nut)

Toland (Tezcatlipoca)

Triki (Loki)

Uday (Sopdet)

Unas (Shu)

Valeria (Quetzalcoatl)

Wu You (Dijiang)

Xiao Yin (Azure Dragon)

Xuan Pin (Jiutian Xuannu)

Yamato (Izanagi)

Yu Ran (Bai Ze)

Yu Xu (Jing Wei)

Yun Chuan (Yang Jian)

Yuuhime (Izanami)

Zora (Amunet)

[sixty-silver-wishes]

kinda want to talk about "arsenic and old lace" from a postcolonial reading

So, I think "Arsenic and Old Lace" can be interpreted to say a lot about America and the duality between the perception of it and its history. When you look at the comedy from this angle, I think it becomes a surprisingly cutting satire.

First off, the two aunts can be interpreted to represent America itself. They come across as sweet and charming, but of course, they also regularly commit murder and make no secret of it. They justify their murders by calling it "charity work," which brings to mind similar justifications for imperialism and colonialism- ie., that native populations must be made "cultured" or "educated" by the colonizer. They're also xenophobic to the point of not wanting a foreigner's body mixed in with their "nice decent" bodies, who are assumed to be Anglo-American Christians (they make quite a big deal of the religious denominations of their victims). The flippancy towards America's past is even demonstrated in a line in which Mortimer claims the Brewster ancestors on the Mayflower "scalped the Indians" (literally taking part in the genocide of Native Americans), and Elaine responds with, "that's ancient history."

The analysis gets interestingly complicated when it comes to the character of Teddy. Teddy, of course, thinks he's Theodore Roosevelt, and his delusional episodes are played for laughs, but in the context of this analysis, the figure of Theodore Roosevelt is a significant part of a postcolonial satirical reading. Despite his support for American imperialism and racism towards Native Americans, Roosevelt is largely considered in popular culture, even today, to be a noble, adventurous president; just look at his portrayal by Robin Williams in the "Night at the Museum" movies. Teddy's caricature of Roosevelt is a delusion; his image of him is out of touch with reality. And furthermore, the aunts, if representing both America's image and it actions, use Teddy's delusional ideation of an American act of imperialism- Roosevelt's involvement in the construction of the Panama Canal- in order to keep up their murders.

[gnome-adjacent-vagabond]

If anyone has recommendations for more songs to put on these playlists, do let me know and I'll take it into consideration. I've made a playlist for each of the Brewsters and Elaine; I believe they're all public! For the sake of space I only included Jonathan, Einstein, and Martha and Abby.

[angelamontoo]

Wait I wanna hear about ur Mortimer Brewster hate.

I never cared for him personally but I wanna hear ur reason, if you don't mind.

Oh I probably shouldnt have called myself a hater, that's a bit too strong and negative a word for how I feel about Mortimer. Tbh with how unsympathetic and just plain boring a lot of leading men(aswell as other characters who we, the audience, are expected to have some automatic, unearned liking for)are in a lot of these old films, I can't truly hate Mortimer just cause hes at least consistently genuinely funny and interesting to watch.

Still, Mortimer has a lot of pretty unlikeable characteristics that it took multiple rewatches of the film for me to really notice, or at least think about fully. It's definitely partially my opinion being influenced by other AAOL fans who's post about why they hate Mort got me thinking more about just what a massive douche he is in the film, but plenty of it is stuff I kinda noticed myself and then focused on more with every rewatch while I was waiting for Einstein to appear.

The most obvious shitty trait about Mortimer is ofc the way he treats Elaine, ignoring her, berating her, stringing her along and being a condescending dickweed, all because of his own internal conflicts and as a Lorre fan, I'm obligated to be somewhat offended by how needlessly mean he is to Herman, but what really bothers me personally is the way he treats his aunts and especially Teddy. He talks down to his aunts like they're little kids instead of the people who raised him, essentially his mothers and has 0 gratitude for everything they've done for him despite Abby and Martha treating him like their golden child, being thrilled to cart them off to happydale with Teddy. Speaking of, the utter lack of empathy Mortimer has for his own brother, who has never done anything more harmful to anyone else than blow a bugle too loud, is vile. He has no moral qualms letting Teddy potentially take the fall for murder when he's never shown signs of violence before just because "everyone already knows he's crazy" and Mortimer was always planning to shove Teddy into a nuthouse when his aunts croaked anyway so it's no skin off his nose.

Also, while I'm happy that Herman makes it out of the film unscathed, the fact that Mortimer let's someone who he knows was at least an accomplice to multiple murders walk free just because he helps Mort unload his inconvenient relatives into somebody else's care, is proof that Mortimers eagerness to be rid of his family has nothing to do with him being worried that they'll hurt more innocent people. For all Mortimer knows, Herman's every bit as dangerous as Jonathan.

So yeah if I was gonna make a tiere list for leading men in Lorre films(not including the few where Pete fills that role ofc) Mort would probably rank relatively high for being fun to watch and having some sympathetic moments, but that is not saying much

Also thanks for this ask. My blogs mainly about pete characters ofc, but I like having an excuse to talk about some other characters I'm interested in from his films

[bodiesinourcellar]

Idk if anyone plays ponytown but I have the whole family. and I thought id share em